One of our servers running Leopard Server 10.5.7 will no longer boot. It is our backup server and was last running PresStore 3.2 server. After rebooting it now gets stuck on the White Apple logo boot screen and goes no further. After running the usual diagnostics in disk utility it found no errors so I tried booting in Verbose mode to get a closer look at what was happening. The only errors that I could see referred to missing software update files and that the following crash report had been created:

Process: loginwindow [367]
Path: /System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindow
Identifier: loginwindow
Version: ??? (???)
Code Type: X86 (Native)
Parent Process: launchd [1]

Date/Time: 2010-01-04 16:57:47.903 +0000
OS Version: Mac OS X Server 10.5.7 (9J61)
Report Version: 6
Anonymous UUID: A5B2D1D8-60ED-4902-9552-547E6A6C65F2

Exception Type: EXC_BREAKPOINT (SIGTRAP)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000002, 0x0000000000000000
Crashed Thread: 0

Dyld Error Message:
Library not loaded: /usr/lib/libcurl.4.dylib
Referenced from: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DiskImages.framework/Versions/A/DiskImages
Reason: image not found

I'm not exactly sure what its referring to in the log and I'm not sure where to go next. Rebuilding is a last resort as it has a lot of software configured on this drive and would take the involvement from several of our suppliers.

Please help!

Many thanks

Leon

Hi there

I am assuming you have no backup?

A couple of things to try.

1. Does it boot in safe mode? ie hold down the shift key at boot If it does it may indicate a bad cache of third party extension.
2. Failing that boot the server into target disc mode and attach to another Mac. Then try applying the Server 10.5.8 combo update over it. This is not a complete reinstall but will refesh a lot of system files.

If this fails you may well be looking at a rebuild.

Best of luck

Richard

The drive is synced every night and same thing happened to both drives! A change in strategy me thinks...

Unfortunately no it does not boot into safe mode and reapplying the OS update hasn't brought it back to life.

No matter, we have just had to bite the bullet and rebuild the drive from scratch.

Thanks anyway for the suggestions.

Leon